Barbara Tuchman (1912 – 1989)
Award-winning American historian and author.
Vainglory, however, no matter how much medieval Christianity insisted it was a sin, is a motor of mankind, no more eradicable than sex. As long as combat was desirable as the source of honor and glory, the knight had no wish to share it with the commoner, even for the sake of success.
On being shown a relic said to be a bone of St. Elizabeth, he (Sigismund) turned it over and remarked that it could just as well be that of a dead cobbler.
Nothing is more certain than death and nothing uncertain but its hour.
As the era of the sword was ending, that of firearms began, in time to allow no lapse in man’s belligerent capacity.
When truth and reason cannot be heard, then must presumption rule.
In individuals as in nations, contentment is silent, which tends to unbalance the historical record.
Left to face a hungry winter robbed of their hard-earned harvests, the people experienced their own warrior class not as protectors but ravagers.
Perhaps by this time the 14th century was not quite sane. If enlightened self-interest is the criterion of sanity, in the verdict of Michelet, “no epoch was more naturally mad.”
Governments do not like to face radical remedies; it is easier to let politics predominate.
Voluntary self-directed religion was more dangerous to the Church than any number of infidels.
Chroniclers habitually matched numbers to the awesomeness of the event.
If all were equalized by death, as the medieval idea constantly emphasized, was it not possible that inequalities on earth were contrary to the will of God?
For most people reform meant relief from ecclesiastical extortions.
That conflict between the reach for the divine and the lure of earthly things was to be the central problem of the Middle Ages.
The social damage was not in the failure but in the undertaking, which was expensive. The cost of war was the poison running through the 14th century.
Survivors of the plague, finding themselves neither destroyed nor improved, could discover no Divine purpose in the pain they had suffered. God’s purposes were usually mysterious, but this scourge had been too terrible to be accepted without questioning. If a disaster of such magnitude, the most lethal ever known, was a mere wanton act of God or perhaps not God’s work at all, then the absolutes of a fixed order were loosed from their moorings. Minds that opened to admit these questions could never again be shut. Once people envisioned the possibility of change in a fixed order, the end of an age of submission came in sight; the turn to individual conscience lay ahead. To that extent the Black Death may have been the unrecognized beginning of modern man.
History is the unfolding of miscalculations.
Economic man and sensual man are not suppressible.
What counts is not so much the fact as what the public perceives to be the fact.
Business, like a jackal, trotted on the heels of war.